by David Abrams
An electric ripple passes through us. An alarm clock goes off.
Rat Face and his cousin continue to play tug of war until Rat Face gives a violent yank and tries to drag the other man across the yard. Dust rises in a cloud as they move away from the door and Arrow hears the cousin pleading, “Min fadlak! Min fadlak!”
Please! Please!
Arrow’s heart sinks. We’re on a speedboat up shit creek. Our element of surprise is blown. Now we’ll have to take the place by force. We’re kidding ourselves if we think we hadn’t been expecting this all along.
Arrow gets to his feet and signals us to start the attack. We rise and are about to move out from our positions.
Just then, another man appears in the doorway. He wears a yellow T-shirt smeared with dirt and grease. He holds a gun in his hand. He calls out in a loud voice and Rat Face and his cousin, halfway across the yard, stop their struggling. Yellow Shirt yells again—this time, a question.
Rat Face lets go of his cousin’s arms and, trying to adopt a casual swagger, walks back to the house, greeting the man in a loud, bright voice: “As-salaamu alaykum !”
“Wa alaykumu as-salam,” the man returns, but looks puzzled.
Rat Face babbles in a flutter of words, working his hands through the air as he approaches the house. He’s laying it on thick. His voice soothes, pats, and assures the man he only wants to show his cousin something in the marketplace or maybe he wants to take him out for dinner and a movie or whatever his excuse is. He might have succeeded, too, if Yellow Shirt hadn’t looked up, beyond Rat Face’s shoulder, at Arrow and the rest of us caught in the midst of crouching back down behind our cover. We’ll admit, not our finest hour. We jumped the gun, so to speak.
It only takes two seconds for the lightbulb to click in Yellow Shirt’s head.
He growls, raises his gun, and shoots our new friend full in the face. Rat Face falls back, dead before he hits the ground.
Then he points his gun two inches to the right and shoots the cousin in the chest. The majority of his ribs, heart, and lungs burst through a hole in his back.
Fuck. It’s all gone to shit in a blink.
Arrow rushes across the street, stops at the edge of the yard, and takes aim. This stuns Yellow Shirt because he wavers for a regrettable three seconds—trying to choose between firing on the Americans or barricading himself back inside the house. Three seconds is more than Arrow needs.
As Fish later puts it, “The bomb maker’s head blowed up good!”
Arrow’s M4 chatters a burst of rounds and, behold, Yellow Shirt has a red necklace beneath his chin. There is an eruption, blood shooting everywhere. Something the size of a head bounces off the porch wall. The body, still acting on orders from a brain no longer there, thrashes from side to side, then tries to take a step forward before collapsing in a jelly-legged heap. Yellow Shirt’s gun clatters to the porch.
From inside the house come high-pitched shouts from several different voices. Then a scream. Then a gunshot. Then silence.
We move forward in our preplanned swarm of the house. There are two more shots fired at us from inside before we take the objective: one pings off the garbage barrel and ricochets into the side of the goat, killing it instantly; the other—the one, as it turns out, that turns the entire course of events around a new corner—strikes O in his chest, knocking him to the ground. Most of the bullet lodges in the steel blanket of the ballistic vest. Most of the bullet. The rest—a shard no bigger than a mosquito—goes elsewhere.
None of us notice because we’re fever pitched with adrenaline and moving forward.
Arrow was right. This is what we’ve come here for. Moments like this are the final exam of all those years of training—from boot camp at our various locations to the field training exercises when we all came together, coalesced into cohesion, at Fort Drum—and going back further, deeper into our selves, when we sat in the movie theater awash with Rambo and Tom Cruise and mud-streaked men straining up a jungled hill with Mel Gibson toward their deaths in We Were Soldiers. We were soldiers then, before we became soldiers now. It feels like we have always been soldiers moving along escalators to this moment when we can cock back our legs, boot kick through a door, and shoot bad men—bomb makers—in the chest.
We have not forgotten about Sergeant Morgan and the mission at hand, but he’s been moved to the back burner because we’re in the here and now and the shit is really real. We are in the moment.
In a volley of shouts, rifle clatter, and profanity, Arrow forces his way into the house, followed by Fish, Drew, and Park. They are steel plated. Their legs are springs moving them forward into the uncertainty of the house’s interior. Rifles grow out of their faces, sweeping the room, pinning everything down with a metallic stare.
We find seven other men—four of them with soldering irons and circuit boards in their hands, one of the others dropping his AK-47 and raising his hands. He’s just seen his friend’s head burst in a red mist and he does not want to fuck around with these Americans.
As for the other two—well, let’s just say they are committed and refuse to go down without a fight. They don’t let go of their rifles until their bodies have been unstitched with our bullets. We pull our triggers by instinct and reflex and, just like that, we resolve the situation. By the book? No, but we are in the moment and that’s all that matters.
That’s when the four circuit board hajjis decide they want a piece of the action. They’ve ducked down beneath their worktable. Seconds later, four AK-47s pop up above the table, carelessly spraying rounds that embed in the ceiling.
This gives Fish, Drew, and Arrow enough time to bend at the waist, aim their rifles like the well-trained Americans they are, and—pop-pop-pop-pop!—take out the trash.
There is an iron-smelling moment as our ears ring with the afterwhine of the shots.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
Our hearts kettle drum. Our eyes sting from the rifle smoke.
A clatter-slither comes at us from the corner of the room. We swivel our M4s and find the openmouthed, wide-eyed face of a hajji. The only bomb maker left alive. The smartest one in the room. His arms are in the air. He’s kicked his AK-47 across the floor toward us.
Fish sucks in his breath, which sounds like the prelude to something.
“Hold fire! Hold fire!” Arrow yells. “Cease fire, Fish!”
Fish doesn’t lower his weapon, but he does exhale like he’s finding a rhythm of breath on a rifle range.
“Fish, goddammit!”
With a growl, Fish pulls his cheek off the M4’s stock.
Arrow tells Park to secure the AK-47, then zip-tie the prisoner. That’s what Arrow calls him: the prisoner.
Cheever, the chubby coward, finally enters the house, his rifle held at eye level.
“It’s over, Cheever,” Drew says.
Cheever says, “Okay.” He lowers his weapon.
Then Arrow goes, “Park and Drew, you stay with the prisoner. Cheever and Fish, you come with me to search the rest of the house. Clear the rooms and grab any evidence you find. Anything we can carry.”
“As if,” Cheever says. “Like I’m really gonna stuff a pipe bomb in my pack and take it with me to FOB Saro.”
Fish, his adrenaline having run its course, goes, “Shut up, Cheever.” Then he says, “You stay here and search the bodies. Drew and I’ll take this hallway.”
“Fuckin’ you search the bodies.” But Fish and Drew have already left the room, joining Arrow as they, one by one, clear the rest of the house. Cheever groans, but walks over to the bodies and gives one of them a feeble nudge with the toe of his boot.
The rest of us go through the rooms quickly, efficiently, like this was a training exercise with NCOs standing by with stopwatches and clipboards.
There’s a boy in the bedroom. He’s tied to the bedposts—all four of them, so he’s spread-eagled for someone’s pleasure. He has no pants. He also has a single gunshot wound to the chest. As Arrow stands in the
doorway, he watches that hole go spurt-spurt-spurt, the blood jets smaller and smaller each time. He turns and leaves after the last one.
Fish finds the mother in the bathtub and calls to Arrow.
The woman crouches in the tub, hands clasped over her head. She says a word in Arabic that’s probably something like “don’t.” She cowers and says, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
“We won’t,” Arrow says in Arabic. “Don’t worry. We won’t.”
He and Fish reach forward, take her by the elbows, and lift her out of the tub. She weighs more than they expected. It’s only when she’s on her feet on the tiled bathroom floor, only when she stands up straight and pulls her elbows out of their hands, they see she’s pregnant.
And not just pregnant, but filled-to-bursting-with-baby, any-minute-now pregnant. Now we remember Rat Face saying something about this.
She looks at Fish and Arrow, her eyes going back and forth between them: Don’t don’t don’t.
Her face is shaped like a pear and her skin is the color of toasted coconut. If the circumstances were any different, we’d probably think she was a hot chick. Fish, for one, thinks he would do her.
But these aren’t those kind of circumstances. Not here in this shot-up house that smells of blood and fear and gunpowder. Right now, she’s just another hajji scared shitless by armor-clad Americans.
“You’re safe,” Arrow tells her. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He takes the woman by the elbow again and leads her out of the bathroom, through the gore-streaked living room, and into the kitchen at the rear of the house. She walks like a zombie, or the lady from the second row who’s been called to the stage by the hypnotist and told to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while flapping her arms like a chicken. She can’t speak and it’s obvious she’s not seeing anything except a fog bank in front of her face. Arrow points to a chair and she sits.
Arrow walks up to Fish and says in a low voice, “Keep an eye on her and don’t let her go anywhere near the front of the house.”
Around that time, Drew comes up and asks if anyone has seen O. Arrow leaves the kitchen calling O’s name and we hold our breath, waiting for an answer that never comes. Drew dashes out the front door and finds O on his back near the dead goat.
“O!” Drew cries. Arrow and everyone except Cheever hustle out to the yard. Cheever stays inside with the zip-tied hajji. Because someone needs to stay with the prisoner—and because Cheever is pretty sure he’ll puke if he has to see one more dead body.
O is alive. He struggles to sit up, but keeps flopping back.
His mouth opens and closes, wordless, and then the rest of us are pulling off his helmet, patting his legs, loosening his belt, yelling over and over: “Where does it hurt? Where’d they hit you?” O gulps more air, then gasps, “I’m okay! Punched the breath out of me for a moment, that’s all.” He pants. “Por Dios, it hurts!” He rubs the part of his chest covered by the ballistic plate. “Awww, goddamn! It stings like a motherfucker.”
“Don’t be a pussy,” Fish says.
“Shut up, Fish,” Drew says, still trying to loosen O’s belt.
“I’ll be fine,” O says. “Just feels like I got walloped by a sledgehammer is all.”
“Can’t say the same for the goat,” Arrow says and a couple of us laugh. Then Olijandro goes, “Drew, you fag, would you stop trying to get in my pants?” and we all laugh.
Fish calls out, “Save it for back at the FOB, Drew.”
Drew rebounds with: “Whenever you’re ready, O, you let me know.”
We laugh, getting it out of our system. Arrow says nothing, walks away from the group.
Then it’s back to business.
We help O to his feet. He wobbles a bit and breathes like a racehorse at the finish line, but otherwise seems okay.
We have veered off the path. We know this, and we also know we’ve made a series of mistakes and there’s probably some giant cosmic hand somewhere waiting to finger flick our line of dominoes. But you know what? We could give two shits. We’ve veered, we’ve fucked up, but the world is also seven bad guys fewer. Soon we’ll be back in the States screwing our wives and eating cheeseburgers at the In-N-Out and doing our best to reset our lives back to normal. This afternoon will stick with us for a while, but eventually it’ll just be one more thing we did during our time in Iraq.
Eventually. For now, we still need to figure out what to do with the leftover bomb maker. He’s unfinished business, which makes him a loose end.
Arrow coughs the gunpowder taste from his mouth. “So, now what?”
We look at him. We thought he had the answers. We were depending on him to map us out of this situation.
“We make it up as we go along,” Park says, which at this point turns out to be not just the smartest thing anyone could say, but the only thing anyone could say.
32
Land Nav
We’ve been here before.
Lost. Confused. Afraid.
Land nav at Fort Drum is no joke. When you are knee-deep in snow and can’t see through the fog to the gloves at the end of your arms, when the shouts of others on the course come to you wet, thin, and from all directions at once, when the points you’ve plotted on the snow-moist map in your hands are nothing but smeared ink and even a six-digit grid coordinate is hard to hold in your head, then you know you are truly good and fucked. There’s no laughing in land navigation. There’s no crying in baseball.
It’s so cold in these woods even the needle on the compass doesn’t want to move. Stay still, stay warm. Legs plowing through the snow just stir up the cold and so we slow down—though we know we should be hustling to the next point if we want to make it through this course on time. Nobody wants to recycle through the Warrior Leadership Course and start all over again because of land nav, which right now is totally messing with our heads.
We’re sent out in pairs—Arrow and Park, Drew and O—but midway through the course, somewhere around the third point, we come together. We find each other through the trees and snow fog.
“Hey,” Arrow says.
“Hey,” O answers.
“You guys get anything?”
“We got the first and second points, but we’re damned if we can find the next one.”
We pull out our damp maps and consult.
“We think our pace count is off,” Drew says.
“Even though we both came up with the same thing,” O reminds him.
“At this point, we think the cadre are just fucking with us,” Drew says.
We look around, as if we expect Staff Sergeant Latham and Sergeant First Class Robertson to jump out from behind a tree and yell: Boo-yah! You’ve been punked!
“We haven’t done much better,” Park says.
“Shut up, Park,” Arrow says.
“What?” Park says. “I don’t care if they know or not. We’re all in this together.”
Arrow and Park have a moment between them, a glance that says: I told you not to say anything.
“We’ll find the points,” Arrow says. “We got this.”
“Maybe we should work together from here on out,” O says.
“I’m all for that—” Park says, but overlaps Arrow’s response.
Which is: “Fuck that.”
They stab each other with another look.
Park shakes his head, then walks away to find a tree. He fumbles with all the layers of his arctic uniform for a minute, then cocks his head back and sighs as he releases his piss in a steam cloud against the tree. We’re guessing he pictures Arrow’s face somewhere in the bark of that tree trunk.
Drew pulls out an energy bar, unwraps it, and eats it in four bites.
“Arguing won’t get us unfucked,” Drew says in a spray of nuts and oats.
“Yeah,” O says. “I think we should work together on this.”
Arrow pulls out his map and plastic protractor, squinting and wiping snot drips on the back of his glove. He ignores the others and goes right on figuring
the six-digit grid coordinate for the hundredth time that morning.
Park returns, saying, “That felt good.”
O pulls out a stick of beef jerky. It’s frozen and he has to work his teeth on it before the meat tears apart with a fibrous sound.
We sit there, huddled close for warmth. We hear other voices ricochet between the trees, but it’s impossible to say where they’re coming from. They could be two hundred yards away, or they could be two miles. It feels like the ceiling of fog is getting lower and lower all the time. We don’t know if Watertown is ahead of us or somewhere off to the east—wherever east is, anyway. Even the clouds of breath coming from our mouths disorient us. At this point, we’ll be lucky if we cross the finish line before dark. We can picture the NCOs with their stopwatches, smirking at us as we stumble to the checkpoint.
Arrow puts his protractor back in his ammo pouch then stands up. “Come on, Park. I think I’ve got it now.”
Park climbs to his feet and cinches his rucksack.
“You’re not gonna share?” Drew says. But Park and Arrow are already slipping off through the trees. Park tosses the others an apologetic glance over his shoulder, but he still goes with Arrow.
Drew and O sit there. They can wait for the sun to burn away the heavy weather, but they both know it’s no good. The fog of war is here to stay.
“You got any more jerky?” Drew asks. O gives him the last piece, the one he’d been about to pop in his mouth.
Then the two of them stand, tighten their rucks, and head off in the opposite direction of Arrow and Park, purely on principle.
None of us reach the finish line before midnight, our due-back time long past. Once we’re all there around the campfire, Latham and Robertson lean back in their lawn chairs and stare at us, standing there bedraggled and shivering. Then they spit snoose juice into their soda cans and tell us to drop and give them fifty.
33
Inventory
COMPUTER CIRCUIT BOARDS (×10)
AK-47 (×16)
M16, AMERICAN ISSUED (×24)